Cardinal Mindszenty Dies As an Exile in Vienna at 83

Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty, the Roman Catholic Primate of Hungary who was regarded in the West as a symbol of antiCommunism after his imprisonment following a mock treason trial in Budapest in 1949, died yesterday in exile in Vienna at the age of 83.

The Cardinal had undergone prostate surgery earlier in the day, and his death was attributed by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vienna to a “heart stoppage.”

Once a storm center in the cold war, Cardinal Mindszenty, an intractable, uncompromising foe of both Fascism and Communism, by the late nineteensixties had become a bit of an embarrassment both to the church, which was seeking a modus vivendi with the Soviet bloc, and the United States, which was seeking eldtente with the Soviet Union.

Fifteen years earlier, after being freed briefly from a Communist prison during the abortive Hungarian uprising, he was given asylum in the American Embassy in Budapest. He was a virtual prisoner there, subject to frequent entreaties from the Vatican to leave Hungary. He refused.

But after the Cardinal received a letter from President Nixon assuring him that his continuing presence under the American wing was not in the best interests of the American Government, Cardinal Mindzenty finally consent:A to leave his beloved Hungary in 1971.

Following his release, the Cardinal continued acts of anti‐Communist defiance that conflicted with his church's own efforts at détente with the Communist world, and in February, 1974, Pope Paul VI stripped him of his offices as Primate of Hungary and Bishop of Esztergom.

In the Vatican yesterday, a spokesman for the pontiff expressed “anguish and grief” over the death of the churchman who for 35 years refused to submit to what he considered “atheistic and materialistic forces.”

In Washington yesterday, President Ford said the Cardinal “stood for courage, integrity, and unfailing faith. There was an heroic quality about him that marked this man as a crusader for liberty.”

Cardinal Cooke noted that “Cardinal Mindszenty endured sufferings far beyond the capacity of most human beings, yet he never ceased to be a symbol of courage, integrity, and hope. He was a man of faith, and of deep, uncomplicated and unswerving belief.”

Son of Farmer

Born Jozsef Pehm in Mindszent in western Hungary on March 29, 1892, the Cardinal adopted the Magyarized version of his name. He was one of six children of a farmer, and he attended the village school and went on to an academy run by monks in Szombathely.

When he entered the seminary there, the subbornness that was to become one of the future Cardinal's internationally known traits rose to the surface. He refused to live in the seminary. And later, when his Bishop sent him to Vienna for further study at the university, the young seminarian declined to live with his classmates at the Pazmaneum. (Ironically, it was at the Pazmaneum that he spent his last years in exile.)

Ordained in 1915, Father Mindszenty, as an assistant pastor in two small villages, became involved in politics. He helped edit a local newspaper in Zalaegerszeg and became a leader of the local Christian party. In 1919 Count Karolyi's revolutionary government arrested him as an enemy of the state. That same year he was arrested by Bela Kun's Communists and held briefly.

During World War II, in 1944, Father Mindszenty was made Bishop of Veszprem by Pope Pius XII. With the other bishops, he issued carefully worded warnings to the government about cooperating with the occupying German Nazis, and later, because of some stronger protests, he was arrested by the Hungarian Nazis.

Cardinal Mindszenty is credited with acting with great courage after his arrest, putting on his episcopal robes and marching off to prison in a procession accompanied by 16 theology students and three of their instructors. Later a fellow bishop arranged for his release from the notorious high security prison at Kohida.

After the war, in 1945, the Vatican, seeking a modus vivendi with the new Eastern European Communist states, made the churchman, who had been so gallantly anti‐Nazi, the Primate of Hungary and Archbishop of Esztergom. This was apparently meant as a friendly gesture to the new anti ‐ Nazi. Communist regime. But the man who had made himself a church hero soon showed that he disapproved of what he considered tyranny from any side.

“Hungary seems to have simply exchanged one totalitarian regime for another,” said the new Primate, and it did not take long for the Government to crank into operation a bitter anti ‐ Mindszenty reaction, led by the controlled press.

He was attacked publicly, and placed high on the list of Communist demonology. This, of course, also made him a hero in the eyes of Catholics and land‐Communists in Hungary and elsewhere, and Pope Pius's reward was a Cardinal's hat in 1946.

But the battle in Hungary between state and church broadened, and it came to a crisis over the issue of secularization of Catholic' schools, a point the Cardinal refused even to discuss with the Gov ernment unless it met certain preliminary conditions of his own.

Knew He Faced Arrest

Knowing he faced arrest, the Cardinal issued a statement saying that should he “confess” any crime, it would be as a result of torture, and that any evidence used against him in court would be manufactured by the Communists.

On Dec. 26, 1948, he was arrested, and in some remote place was stripped and beaten into semi‐consciousness, while being interrogated ceaselessly. After some six weeks of this treatment, the Cardinal was pronounced ready for a show trial, which was given wide coverage by the Western press beginning on Feb. 3, 1949, in Budapest.

What newsmen and photographers and through them their readers saw was a hauntingly hollow‐eyed and gaunt shell of a man, who somberly recanted his statement that any “confession” would be false. Appearing to many to have been drugged, he listlessly “confessed” to a long string of treason‐related charges brought by the Communist state.

Charges Against Him

In 1975, some of the charges against Cardinal Mindszentywhich in 1949 were widely assumed to be mostly trumped up—sound comic and ridiculous in a tragic way: He had conspired with the Habsburgs to bring back the monarchy, and with the American Embassy in Budapest to start World War III: he had conspired with the Catholic clergy to draw up a future cabinet of a government he would run and he was involved in currency smuggling.

Inevitably, the Cardinal was found guilty and the court, in what it termed a spirit of “great leniency,” sentenced him to “penal servitude for life.” Consistently, Cardinal Mindszenty implacably refused a “pardon” from his tormentors, insisting, rather, on an apology from them.

For years the Primate was moved from one prison to another, always being deprived of even speaking to another hu man being. By 1955 and deStalinization, he was giver guarded quarters in a building in which other churchmen were imprisoned and on occasion was allowed to speak with them.

Refused to Go to Rome

A week after the uprising in Hungary on Oct. 30, 1956, the Cardinal was released from prison by a young major who was later executed for his kindness. With the defeat of the uprising, he took refuge in the American Embassy, where he was to live for 15 years in a three‐room apartment. He refused to take advantage of efforts by Pope John XXIII to have him given sate passage to Rome, contending, that the proper place for the Primate of Hungary was Hungary.

The Cardinal was finally spirited from the embassy, under heavy Hungarian Secret. Police guard, on Sept. 29, 1971, by prior arrangement with the Vatican and the American Embassy. In his memoirs, published last April, Cardinal Mindszenty said that President Nixon had sent him a letter in which he suggested that the Cardinal should “bow to my fate.”

“Despite the courtesy of the tone I realized from the President's letter that from now on I would actually be an unwanted guest in the embassy,” said the Cardinal.

After his arrival in Rome, the Cardinal was welcomed with “Pope Paul's embrace and the gift of the pontiff's pectoral cross. But soon Cardinal Mindszenty read in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, that his departure from Bud??pest had removed a great burden from the church's shoulders in its relations with the state in Hungary.

In December, 1971, Pope Paul declared the Archhishopric of Esztergom vacant. That was not long after be had asked the Cardinal to resign the Primacy of Hungary, on the ground that there had been no working Primate in Hungary for 25 years.

Last year Cardinal Mindszenty toured several American cities, visiting many HungarianAmerican parishes and bitterly condemning communism in all its forms. “Cardinal Mindszenty cannot abdicate,” he said of his refusal to give up his church posts.

In the final paragraph of his memoirs, released here by Macmillan, Cardinal Mindszenty wrote: “There is nothing more to say. I found waiting to greet me at the end of the road, complete and absolute exile.”

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A version of this archives appears in print on May 7, 1975, on Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Cardinal Mindszenty Dies As an Exile in Vienna at 83. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe